I wasn’t really sure what to expect. The Pacers are owned by two brothers, Herb and Mel Simon. I had known Mel for years because he used to rent office space to a friend of mine, Lu Meis. I always liked Mel a lot. He’s a happy-go-lucky guy, and a huge basketball fan. We used to play golf together once in a while. I don’t think he pays much attention to the finances of the team. I think he leaves that up to Herb.
By the time I went to Indianapolis, I had been hearing from a number of my contacts that Donnie wanted me really bad, and he’d do whatever he could to get me. So the first thing I had to figure out was could I work for Donnie Walsh? I didn’t have any strong feelings about Donnie one way or the other before then, so I did one of my background checks on him.
I do background checks on people whenever I might be entering some kind of business relationship with them. Nothing too scientific—I just talk to a bunch of different people, listen to their thoughts. I usually go to a guy who’s ticked off at the world for his opinion. If he says something good about the person and has nothing but bad things to say about everyone else, then you’d better pay attention.
Whenever I asked someone about Donnie Walsh, the same thing kept coming back to me. All I heard was that Donnie was just like me, that he would put everything out there, and he wouldn’t pull any punches. And you know what? That’s exactly the way it has been. Donnie has never lied to me, and he’s never going to. I knew that two days after I met him. You don’t find that very often, especially in this business.
I felt my meeting with Donnie went pretty well. I laid it out for him right then and there how I would handle the team. I told him I would stress conditioning, and being on time. I told him I thought they had a real chance to win the championship if they could get their players to believe they could beat Michael Jordan. To me, that was going to be one of the biggest problems. Jordan had become bigger than life. Everyone in the league seemed to be afraid of him, or intimidated by him. Even the referees! Somehow the Pacers needed a new mindset, one that would convince them Jordan was human and Chicago was not untouchable.
I had some other ideas I told him about that day. I told him I would want two assistants: a young guy with ideas, and a veteran who has been around. I knew that wasn’t going to go over too big in the coaching fraternity, because most teams hired three assistants, and in some cases four, but I knew what I wanted. I wanted to keep things simple, and for all of us to be focused on the same issues. To me, three coaches was more than enough to run a team that had only twelve guys. Sure enough, after my coaching staff had been announced, there was a lot of grumbling that went on among the other coaches. I guess some coaches felt I was setting a bad trend, and they were worried that if our staff succeeded, it might convince other teams to downsize the number of coaches. Hey, the last thing I wanted to do was cost anybody a job, but my feeling is that if you are good enough, somebody will hire you. I wasn’t going to hire three coaches just because somebody decided that was what you were supposed to do.
I wasn’t going to waste a lot of time worrying about whether I fit in with the other coaches or not. I knew there were plenty of them who were ticked off that I was handed a head coaching job without any previous experience, but my feeling was, why not wait and see what I can do before you criticize me? I also knew there were plenty of coaches out there rooting against me in my first season. That’s fine. They can do what they want. Actually it made it easier for me, because I had already decided there wasn’t going to be a whole lot of handshaking and chatting going on between me and somebody I wanted to beat that night. I prefer to take the floor, play the game, and get off without talking to anybody from the other team, whether it’s a player, coach, or general manager. I never liked it as a player when guys socialized with the opponent. When the Lakers played Detroit, Magic Johnson used to kiss his friend Isiah Thomas, who played for the Pistons, before the game. I couldn’t believe it. I hated that. That’s against everything I believe in. I tell my guys, “Hey, this is a game. If you want to hug and kiss those guys, you do it afterwards.”
There was one more point I wanted to make to Donnie Walsh at our meeting in Indianapolis. I told him that I wanted the players, not me, to be the focal point of the team. Coaches don’t score a single point out there. They don’t play hurt, or take a charge. In the end, the players determine who wins and who loses, and the last thing I wanted was a situation where I was expected to be an attraction. There was no way I would ever take a job if that was the case.
That’s when Donnie assured me he wanted me to coach because he believed I could handle the job, not because it would help put fans in the seats or because it would help the construction of their new arena. I knew that if I took the job some people would think that’s why the Pacers hired me, but I took Donnie at his word. I knew I could be a lot more than some kind of marketing tool.
I went back to Naples and started looking at the bios of the Pacers players and their stats for the last four or five years. Anyone can get that kind of information. Most of it is on the Internet. I also called a few contacts I had around the league, people I trust, to ask them what they thought about the Pacers players, the front office, the city in general. That’s right—another background check. It wasn’t hard for the people I called to figure out why I was asking, and I think most of them, even though they were good friends, were shocked that I was considering going into coaching. Many of them told me it would be a mistake. Some of them, I think, felt I was risking ruining the so-called image I had built up over the years in the NBA, but I didn’t care at all about that. I wasn’t worried about whether I would succeed. I knew I’d work hard enough to be good at it.
But I still wasn’t sure this is what I wanted. I wasn’t sure I wanted to get myself and my family back into the spotlight, and move them back to Indiana. We had the house in French Lick, but that was more than two hours away, and if I was going to coach the Pacers I knew I’d have to buy something closer to Indianapolis. It was going to mean some big changes. No more golf or fishing. Instead, I’d be traveling, dealing with the media, staying up late agonizing over a loss. There would be renewed interest in my career, which I knew meant a renewed loss of privacy, but the one thing I felt good about was that I know what kind of people live in the state of Indiana, and for the most part they are decent, hardworking people. I always felt a little more comfortable when I went back home, because it seemed like everyone was the same: considerate, friendly, neighborly.
When I said the Pacers job was the only coaching job I would have taken, I was being truthful, but it wasn’t because the Pacers were in Indiana. I was glad to be back in my home state, where I was born and raised, no question about that, but that really didn’t have anything to do with my final decision. The truth was I wanted to coach a veteran team that had a chance to win it all.
If Portland had the same roster as the Pacers, I would be in Portland right now. It was never, “The only place I’ll coach is Indiana.” I do love Indiana, but too much was made of that. It seemed like every story that was written talked about me coming home, and how that’s why I took this job. I could have said something then, but Indiana is a small market, and that kind of publicity was good for the team and the state, so I just sort of rolled with it. But my friends knew the real reason I was attracted to Indiana was because they had a Pacers team who knew what it was like to win, who had been moments away from the NBA Finals, and who were hungry to get back there—and who, I hoped, would listen to me when I tried to help get them there.
The thing was, I had always watched the Pacers games. The one thing that caught my eye with those guys was that I always felt if they could have gotten to the Finals that one year, in 1994, when they lost to the Knicks in seven games in the Eastern Conference Finals, they would have won the championship. I truly believe Indiana matched up with Houston well enough that year to have beaten them.
I always said that if they could have won that one game, Game 6 in Market Square Arena (which they lost, 98–91), they would have been world champions. I watched that whole game, and it made me sick, because I knew they could beat New York, but there were a few key moments in the game where they lost their edge. It looked like they didn’t believe they could win. There were a couple of little breakdowns defensively, a missed rebound, and those were the difference in the series. When I met with Donnie Walsh in Indianapolis I reminded him of that game, and told him it cost them a ring.
After I retired, I used to root for the Pacers, as long as they weren’t playing the Celtics. I liked the guys on their team. I always felt Reggie Miller was one of those rare guys who can hit the big shot, and who wanted the chance to do it. I enjoyed watching Mark Jackson play, because even though he didn’t have the most quickness of the point guards, he found a way to make things happen. And the center, Rik Smits, played very well every time I saw him. They had a nucleus of a team that I always thought I could get something out of.
But I knew I needed help. With no coaching experience at all, I needed an assistant I could count on for everything, and I knew who I wanted: Rick Carlisle. Rick was one of my closest friends. He was an assistant coach in Portland when I called him and told him I was thinking of coaching.
He tried to talk me out of it right from the start. He kept saying, “Larry, you don’t want to do this. You have no idea how much work it is, and how hard it is.” He sent me his entire playbook from Portland, just to give me an idea of what it entailed. He had defensive plays, offensive diagrams, stats, workout plans, everything. It was a big, thick packet, and I bet he was thinking I wouldn’t bother to go over it, but I went through all of it—every page—and all it did was get me more interested in coaching.
I said, “Rick, if I decide to do this, are you coming with me?” Because I really didn’t want to do it unless he was going to be part of it. Rick Carlisle is one of the most dedicated coaches in the league, and I needed his experience, his instincts. We had been friends so long I knew we’d have no problem working together. I knew in my first year I was going to have to really rely on someone, and Rick was the only one that made sense to me.
I first met Rick Carlisle when he came to the Celtics camp as a rookie in 1984. He was a third-round draft pick out of Virginia, and he didn’t have all the talent in the world, but right away, even as a rookie, he knew he shouldn’t come in and try to beat people out, but try and come in and make the people who were already there better. That’s a big difference. The Celtics were a veteran team coming off winning a championship, and the truth was we didn’t need much help. Our first-round pick that year, a kid named Michael Young from Houston, didn’t even make the team. But Rick Carlisle did, mostly because of his smarts and his understanding and willingness to push us in practice.
Carlisle was always on the verge of being cut, and in his second year, the 1985–86 season, the guy he was up against for the final spot on the team was Carlos Clark. Clark had played with us the previous season, and felt he should be playing more. He spent most of preseason trying to steal everybody’s job. If something didn’t go right for Carlos, you could see it by the way he reacted in practice. Meanwhile, Rick was fighting every day, tooth and nail, trying to help all of us improve. He reminded me of another old teammate of mine, Chris Ford, because he got the absolute most out of his talent. I knew Rick would be around basketball a long time, because he was very organized, he loved the game, and everything he did was for a reason. That’s why Rick hardly ever made any mistakes, and that’s why he got the final 1985–86 roster spot, not Carlos Clark. He also got himself a ring, because we won a championship that June.
Anyhow, Rick and I became friends. In the summer he’d come out to French Lick for a couple weeks at a time and work out with me. Then we’d go fishing, or head down to Jubil’s, a local bar in town, and have a couple beers, or sometimes we’d just go up to my friend’s filling station, called Brownie’s, and hang out. But mostly we used that time to really push each other on the court. That’s the other thing about Rick. There weren’t too many guys who worked harder at it. He only stayed in the NBA about five years, but nobody was surprised that he went into coaching. He was a natural.
I couldn’t imagine having my first coaching job without Rick beside me, but weeks went by and he wouldn’t give me an answer. I suppose he had doubts about a team that had only won 39 games the year before, a team that was definitely getting older. He had been in this business long enough to know that if I came in and things went real bad, it would reflect on him too, and he was really close to getting his own chance at a head job.
There was another problem: there were rumors that head coach P. J. Carlesimo was going to be fired in Portland, which meant Rick’s own future was up in the air. He wasn’t sure he could stay in Portland, or whether he would want to stay. He was talking to Danny Ainge about an assistant’s job in Phoenix, and to Chuck Daly about an opening he had in Orlando. I knew Rick would rather live in Phoenix or Orlando than Indianapolis, but what I was hoping it would boil down to was loyalty to me. I really believe he didn’t want to see me fail, and my gut feeling was he was going to sign on with me, but I also knew he really respected Chuck Daly, because he had worked for him before in New Jersey. But I kept telling Rick that Chuck already had his number one guy, Brendan Suhr, who had been with Daly forever, and that Rick would always be under Suhr.
Rick was having trouble deciding. Finally, one night in May of 1997 I told him I needed to know if he was coming to Indiana or not, and he needed to call me that night. He got mad and hung up. I never did hear from him. He called Donnie instead and told him he was coming.
Once Rick was all set, we started talking about who I should hire as the veteran assistant. Since drawing up offensive plays was Rick’s strength, I wanted someone who was defensive minded. My first choice was Jimmy Rodgers, whom I had played for in Boston, and who I thought knew the game as well as anyone. Also, since I knew Jimmy and had a history with him, I figured there would be no problem in terms of trust and understanding each other. So I called the Bulls, where Jimmy was an assistant under Phil Jackson, and asked for permission to talk with him. At the time Chicago was in the middle of the playoffs, and they said I would have to wait until their season was over before I could talk to Jimmy.